Plate waste and recording yield

[richflexo]

Hi everyone,

I am looking for ideas on a way to record your plate waste. I'd like to be able to show our plate maker how much material they are wasting and encourage better practices.

ESKO has an easy way to tell us within Grapholas but does anyone record this kind of data and use it?

Easiest way for me is to do it in excel but does anyone have any examples of how they do it?

-rf

[lavoie]

Plates start in a few standard sized sheets. Once the image is burned onto it, Especially with an impression stagger, there can be a lot of exposed floor. This in not wasted plate though but rather anticipated unused photo-polymer. Just because you are paying by the square inch but by sheet of photo-polymer.

[richflexo]

I'm not calculating the polymer that is washed out.

I just want to know if that 8 colour wide web job that takes 2-3 flats of 42x60, is being utilized and im not finding 20-30% of the material in the trash when we could have waited to fill it up with some label work that is smaller. A lot of our jobs have 2-3 days before going to the customer and who knows how long it can sit at their end before going on press.

I know there is always going to be waste but i'd like to show from month to month what it is so we can be more diligent.

[MrPlateMaker]

Go to your directory where you keep your plates for Esko...
Files>Output>HTML
there is a copy of every plate exposed and it shows waste DATA...

Alternatively you can right click in an empty area inside of merge when you make your plate and record it on a write up sheet which is what we do in our facility.....

[Floeckchen]

I am also interested in this topic.

Do you light not used material for less chemical waste?

Also regarding the point of waiting before producing. On what time margine do you usally operate and why?
I cant understand that many customer are lazy and the approval process takes so much time but as soon as the approval arrived they expect deliverys better yesterday.

[richflexo]

Thanks MrPlateMaker, I will pass this info on to production. We knew about right clicking and getting your data that way. That seems too "manual" and people are lazy. If I can collect the data from the HTMl file, that could be easier for someone to enter in monthly for us.

Thanks for your help!